Animations part of GIRAF Festival of Independent Animation

Lyle Pisio isn’t exactly sure where his ideas come from when creating animated short films, though he’s happy they arrive in the first place.

Pisio will showcase a short film series titled Haiku 1 - 10 at this year’s GIRAF Festival of Independent Animation.

He said there’s no common thread that connects the series. Rather, they’re clips that experiment how sounds and visuals can be intertwined to stimulate the senses.

As a result, the Haiku series are poetic, haunting and beautiful, according to Peter Hemminger, co-programmer of GIRAF.

“There’s a mood to all of (Pisio’s) pieces,” he said. “It’s beautiful in the way that it was put together, and we really latched onto the musical side of it.”

In fact, Pisio teamed up with local musicians who crafted sounds to compliment his videos.

In Haiku 3, he sent one local musician some test footage of a bartender character he created.

As it turns out, the musician thought the clips deserved a rowdy melody, Pisio said.

“It’s a noisy audio track that works really well as a nightmare sequence for this bartender character,” he said, adding the bar surface itself becomes a character and, somehow, a spider manages to make a debut.

In another sequence, Pisio said one character is simply waiting for a phone call, as sounds of a snare drum echo.

“For a couple of pieces, I really wanted gritty guitar sounds,” he said. “I told (collaborators) to spend about five minutes on their piece and not tune their guitar.”

Hemminger said he thoroughly enjoyed the sounds in Pisio’s Haiku series.

“Seeing how sound in (Pisio’s) work was translated on screen was exciting,” he said. “It was hard to pass up.”

GIRAF begins Nov. 26 at the Globe Cinema and The Quickdraw Animation Society. Pisio’s show will begin at 7 p.m. on Nov. 26 at the Globe Cinema.